by Unknown
The provocation of not being able to get to the receiver is still not extreme enough. I must bind myself to the tub, for which purpose underwater straps lie ready; the tongue of the belt can now be drawn through the shackle with my teeth. Perhaps not yet. Let the water get very hot first, so that, in climbing out, I may suffer a stroke. Later. The telephone is now positioned in the farthest corner of the horseshoe-shaped apartment; it’s now a mere matter of forgetting whether in the west or the east wing. Forgetting this would double the time it takes to reach the phone, because I’d first have to look for it in both wings. If someone else lived with me in this scanty apartment I’ve rented, I would at least discuss the situation with him, decide just how secretively this whole business of moving the phone around would have to be carried out so that I couldn’t possibly find it again. Then, dripping wet, fully clothed, I’d be forced to pace in a fury of frustration around the apartment, wringing my ears.
Meanwhile, I climbed out of the tub again and without knowing it, or perhaps forgetting right away what I was doing, I placed the phone in the room in the farthest corner of the east wing of the apartment, past the collapsing fruit crates – no, in that little alcove to the rear of the room with the empty fruit crates, the one that can only be reached via a small winding staircase, the door to which I keep locked. An unbreakable oak-panel door made of several-hundred-year-old New England oak stands between me and the phone that still refuses to ring. I toss the key to this impermeable door out the window. It falls into the big water tank at the district fire station, where the fire department maintains its reserve water supply. The very same structure that likewise houses that famous pole down which the firemen slide from their sleeping quarters to the station house proper, burning their hands in the process, bathing them thereafter in water from the tank. There, at any rate, in that water tank is where my key lies.
By turning on the hot water tap, I bring the water in my tub almost to a boil, the simmering suds dissolve the blue jeans that have come to the fore beneath my cutaway into little blue flakes; the suds dissolve everything. I appear to be naked but don’t dare confirm this possibility with my fingers, for my skin is meanwhile shedding in strips from my flesh, and I see, for instance, the inner joints of my arms floating like hinges in the brew. I am, moreover, still fastened with heavy leather straps to the bottom of the tub. Unfortunately, however, my very upset appears to upset the balance, thereby deflecting the intervention of that ‘extraneous’ element of otherness I so desperately desire. The fact is, I have all the while been mumbling continuous and sometimes criss-crossing conversations with myself, conversations of varying contents, the overall effect of which, however, is to scare away calls. When someone is so continuously consumed with himself, others won’t go near him.
The radio is turned up very loud, a crazy Brazilian reggae. The television is tuned to a midnight porno flick in which a woman, a naked woman – she has it good, I sigh, at least she can see her own skin – hung from a crane, is slowly lowered into molten gold and cranked up again, to the accompaniment of the Pink Panther theme played by Henry Mancini, and then the phone rings. A phone call at last, the magic formula worked, whew! What an effort! And it’s probably a wrong number, and if I could reach the receiver I’d have to hang up again almost immediately. There is, after all, no sweeter pleasure while using the telephone than to lift the receiver a mere centimeter and let it drop again immediately. This stimulates the caller to apply his utmost effort, a laudable challenge, he tries again, and again you pick up the receiver and let it fall, and whoever has been trying to reach you flies in a fury against the invisible bars of his cage like a bloodthirsty animal lusting after the flesh of its keeper. My boiling-hot bathwater stirs me, impelling me to conclude that it must be a wrong number. They hung up.
It’s high time I took the situation in hand. Near-naked and rather alone, I ambled over past the falling fruit crates to the oak panel door and smashed it off its hinges with a single blow. So much for that. Now the telephone stands once again near the edge of the tub, the magic formula cannot be taken to the limit today, here between 75th and 79th Street (71st Street, more than likely) – only a mythomaniac could tell the difference, I see no difference; it’s all the same to me.
I have kept the faucet from dripping; perhaps if I secretly listen in on the telephone line, I will catch a call before the would-be caller finishes dialling and the contraption starts ringing. If I repeatedly pick up the receiver, it is possible that I may provoke a call. All I have to do is precede the caller by several thousandths of a second. That would suffice to forestall the communication of an as yet uncommunicated thought with a complementary thought, likewise revealed. I whisper this into the mouthpiece, but even this relatively parsimonious provocation has no effect. The whole business is shamanistically hexed today, even though the entire telephone system ought to weep with pity for the wet man lying here, scraping off his last covering with a heavy horse brush. No more calls today, the bath can be gradually concluded.
I tie up my legs with the towel. Can’t move. Couldn’t possibly take a step towards the telephone. No way to reach for the receiver. Still nothing doing.
Silence. I glue down the receiver with a permanent fixative. No way to pick it up any more. Reach for the receiver now and you reach for the entire telephone. Let it lie there and the phone will ring, lift it and the phone will go on ringing; there’s no way to separate the receiver, no way to make contact, neither amid the collapsing fruit crates, in the crash of the oak panel door, nor down below in the fire department’s water tank. And even this unstoppable ringing, which with ruthless disregard and cataclysmic force has shattered the silence surrounding my sometimes muttered conversation with myself – even this ringing is a communication, a message that says someone wants you, someone among the multitude wants to speak to you. What they want is virtually you, and what they want to do is to sort of speak with you: that’s why they’re calling an approximation of you: please, they are pleading, as it were, won’t you sort of pick up the receiver. It’s done now. The extreme consequence of my failure to make contact has been realized. This I mutter to myself while slipping back into the cook’s pants which I had previously tossed over the back of the chair. Drain the tub now. Rinse it clean. No call will come through today, I know, and my apartment is slowly bathed in the loneliness of fading light.
The Tales and their Authors
‘My Gmunden’ (‘Mein Gmunden’), by Peter Altenberg, was first collected in the author’s last volume of short prose sketches published in his lifetime, Mein Lebensabend (The Evening of My Life), in 1919.
Peter Altenberg, aka Richard Engländer (1859–1919), drew inspiration for his trademark short prose from the concise aesthetic of Charles Baudelaire’s prose poems and the spatial limitations of the ‘Correspondenzkarte’, the postcard, first launched and disseminated in his native Austria in 1869. Born into a prosperous middle-class Jewish Viennese merchant family, he took advantage of a psychiatric diagnosis of ‘over-excitation of the nervous system’ and ‘incapacity for employment’ to fly the coop and embrace the bohemian hand-to-mouth life of the Coffee-House poet, of which he became the very epitome. For many years he lived in cheap hotels, checked in for several stays at insane asylums and gave the Café Central as his permanent address. Discovered and fêted by the critic Karl Kraus, Altenberg was at one point nominated for a Nobel Prize; and some years after his death was largely forgotten.
‘The Secrets of the Princess of Kagran’ (‘Die Geheimnisse der Prinzessin von Kagran’), by Ingeborg Bachmann, is excerpted from her novel Malina, published in 1971.
Born in Klagenfurt, Austria, Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–73) worked for some years for the Allied radio station Rot-Weiss-Rot, for which she wrote her first radio dramas. Best known for her poetry, she became a member of the celebrated post-war literary circle Gruppe-47, whose members included the novelists Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass and the literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki. But it was anoth
er post-war literary giant, the poet Paul Celan, with whom she had a brief, torrid love affair and a long, tormented friendship, who really got under her skin. ‘The Secrets of the Princess of Kagran’, written following Celan’s suicide, and ten years after they’d broken off all contact, is a barely veiled poetic tribute to him as the saviour unable or unwilling to save himself.
‘The Dandelion’ (‘Die Hundeblume’), by Wolfgang Borchert, was posthumously published in a volume of selected stories of the same name in 1947.
Wolfgang Borchert (1921–47), whose searing poems, short stories, plays and anti-war manifesto made him a major proponent of what has come to be called Trümmerliteratur (rubble literature), hardly lived long enough to leave footprints on posterity. Born in Hamburg, he fled his apprenticeship to a book dealer to study drama and joined a travelling theatre group. But military service in the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front in the Second World War provided more drama than he could bear. Writing home about the horrors he’d witnessed and the miserable conditions, he was arrested by the Gestapo and charged with treasonous statements. A death sentence was commuted to eight months in prison, whereupon he was returned to the Front. Thereafter, one day returning from sentry duty with the middle finger of his left hand missing, he was accused of self-mutilation to evade military service and once again arrested, this time being placed in solitary confinement, after which he was yet again returned to the Front. Frostbite and hepatitis reduced him to a bag of bones with a bitter conscience and a will to live. Later captured by the French, he escaped and walked all the way home to Hamburg. In the little time left he wrote poetry, short fiction and drama that scorch the page and sizzle on stage. He died in 1947 in a hepatic sanatorium in Basel, after drafting his anti-war manifesto Dann gibt es nur eins! (Then We Have Only One Choice!).
‘Shadowlight’ (‘Gegenlicht’), by Paul Celan, first appeared in the journal Die Tat (Zürich), 12 March 1949, and was subsequently included in his book Mohn und Gedächtnis (Poppy and Memory), 1952.
Born in Czernowitz, in the Bukovina, formerly the easternmost German-speaking outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now Chernivtsi, Ukraine, Paul Antschel, aka Paul Celan (1920–70), is considered by many to be the pre-eminent German-language poet of the twentieth century. His Jewish ancestry, the fact that his family perished in the Holocaust, and his own experience of Nazi slave labour camps makes his relationship to the German language and the German literary tradition all the more complex, as if he were enraptured by and entangled in the web of the very verbs that betrayed him. In 1948 Celan moved to Paris, where he worked as a translator and a lecturer in German at the elite École normale supérieure. Recipient of the Bremen Literature Prize in 1958 and the prestigious Georg Büchner Prize, he flung himself into the Seine and drowned on 20 April 1970.
‘Peter Schlemiel’ (‘Peter Schlemihls Wundersame Geschichte’), written in 1813 and first published in 1814, became an international sensation. John Bowring’s English translation of 1824, with illustrations by George Cruikshank, was one of the inspirations for J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. The tale influenced the disparate likes of Hans Christian Andersen, Oscar Wilde, Jacques Offenbach and Karl Marx, and was one of the late Italo Calvino’s great favourites. The title is inspired by the Yiddish word schlemiel, meaning a hopeless incompetent. A displaced French aristocrat of Catholic background and a lifelong outsider, Chamisso socialized and identified with Jewish friends in Berlin.
Born in Ante, in Champagne, France, Louis Charles Adélaïde de Chamisso, aka Adelbert von Chamisso (1781–1838), fled the French Reign of Terror to Berlin, where he spent most of his adult life and found his literary voice in German. A popular poet, his verse was later set to music by Robert Schumann. Also a world traveller and noted botanist, Chamisso joined (and subsequently wrote up in Reise um die Welt [Description of a Voyage Round the World]) a Russian-led scientific expedition, during which he described and named a number of species, including the California poppy, which he named Eschscholzia californica, in honour of the ship’s doctor, Johann Friedrich von Eschscholtz. The latter returned the favour by describing and dubbing the California sun-cup or sun-drop Camissonia in his honour. In a letter to Madame de Staël he espoused his life stance: ‘I am a Frenchman in Germany and a German in France; a Catholic among the Protestants, Protestant among the Catholics; a philosopher among the religious […], a mundane among the savants, and a pedant to the mundane; Jacobin among the aristocrats, and to the democrats a nobleman […] Nowhere am I at home […]!’
‘The Marble Statue’ (‘Das Marmorbild’), by Josef von Eichendorff, was written in 1818 and first published in the literary journal Frauentaschenbuch für das Jahr 1819 (Women’s Handbook for the Year 1819), edited by the author Friedrich de la Motte-Fouqué.
Josef Karl Benedikt Freiherr von Eichendorff, aka Josef von Eichendorff (1788–1857), was born into a Prussian Catholic aristocratic line on the family estate Schloß Lubowitz, in Upper Silesia. His verse having inspired innumerable musical settings, von Eichendorff vies with Heinrich Heine as the most melodized German bard. He is also well known for his prose, notably the novel Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (Life of a Good-for-Nothing), generally considered a classic of German Romanticism, and several fantastic novellas. After fighting against the French occupation forces in the Napoleonic Wars, von Eichendorff held various positions in the Prussian state administration before withdrawing from public life. In later years he translated several of Calderón’s religious dramas from the Spanish and authored a history of German literature.
‘The Singing Bone’, ‘Hansel and Gretel’ and ‘The Children of Hameln’, collected and retold by the Brothers Grimm, were included in the first two volumes of Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Fairy Tales), published in 1812 and 1814 respectively.
The Brothers Grimm, Jakob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm (1786–1859), were born in Hanau, into a family of nine children, six of whom survived. Students of law and linguistics, they worked both independently and together. Best known for their fairy tale collection, they also collaborated on the first German dictionary and a book of German legends. In addition Jakob wrote important books on German grammar, the law and German mythology. Following the demise of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, Germany comprised a loose confederation of city states occupied at the time by Napoleon’s forces. If Germans can be said to have a common character, the Grimms surely had a hand in defining it. The fairy tales they collected, and touched up in their retelling, sounded the depths of the German unconscious. The popularity of their collection, which went through seven editions in the Brothers’ lifetimes, makes it second only to Luther’s translation of the Bible as a formative influence on, and mirror of, the German identity.
‘Descent into the Mines’, by Heinrich Heine, is excerpted from Die Harzreise (The Harz Journey), an almost immediate bestseller upon its appearance in 1826. It was subsequently included in the first section of his Reisebilder (Travel Pictures), a compilation of three travelogues, interspersed with verse, that made the author famous.
The verse of Heinrich Heine (1791–1856) inspired more Lieder than that of any other German poet. His no less notable prose forged a new literary form, equal parts poetic, politic and prophetic. His alternately tongue-in-cheek, alternately lyrical, alternately ironic narrative style elicited Freud’s psycholinguistic analysis in The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious. Born into an assimilated Jewish merchant family in Düsseldorf, under French domination at the time, Heine studied law, which he never practised, converted to Protestantism, in which he never believed, and fled Germany, a place he equally loved and loathed, for France, where he never felt quite at home. Scraping together a meagre living from his verse and journalism, he spent the last twenty years of his life in what he called his ‘mattress grave’, physically paralysed, in Paris.
‘The Lunatic’ (‘Der Irre’), by Georg Heym, was posthumously published in 1913 in the short story collection Der Dieb (The Thief).
B
orn in Hirschberg, in Lower Silesia, Georg Theodor Franz Artur Heym, aka Georg Heym (1887–1912), moved with his family to Berlin. Like so many other German writers, Heym studied law, a profession he only reluctantly and intermittently practised. At meetings of the so-called ‘Neopathetisches Cabaret’ (Neopathetic Cabaret) Heym first gave readings of his plays and poetry. In 1911 he published a book of verse, Der ewige Tag (The Eternal Day), the only work to appear in his brief lifetime. In 1912 he and a friend went skating on the frozen River Havel, fell through a crack and drowned.
‘The Sandman’ (‘Der Sandmann’), by E. T. A. Hoffmann, first appeared in his book Nachtstücke (Night Pieces), Vol. 1 (1816–17). Framed as a cautionary tale, this eye-popping, hallucinatory account of visionary insight disintegrating into madness inspired generations of writers. It also provided rich food for thought for Sigmund Freud in his essay ‘The Uncanny’ and tantalized the surrealists.
Civil servant, composer, conductor, theatre director and music critic of note, Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann, aka E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822), born in Königsberg, Prussia, changed his middle name to Amadeus in homage to Mozart, whose music he revered. But it was with his wild, whimsical tales, sometimes penned at lightning speed, that he made his living and his mark. A thin little man with deep-set eyes, sharp features and porcupine-like hair, as if he were a character of his own creation, with temperament enough for multiple personalities, his face appears to have been as mobile and versatile as his pen, even after his body succumbed to the paralysis of syphilis.
‘In the Penal Colony’ (‘In der Strafkolonie’), by Franz Kafka, was originally written in 1914 and was published in 1919 as the fourth of a series of Drugulin Editions of short works issued by the Verlag Kurt Wolff. In response to his publisher Kurt Wolff’s shock and concern about the violence of the tale, Kafka replied in a letter dated 10 November 1916: ‘Your objections to the distressing aspects accord completely with my own opinion, though I feel that way about almost everything I have written so far … by way of clarifying the latest story, however, let me merely add that it is not alone in being distressing, but that our times in general, and my own time in particular, have been and continue to be equally distressing.’ Among the contemporary critical responses, only one, by Kurt Tucholsky, sounded its murky depths, declaring it to be ‘a work of art so great that it defies all labels [ … ] The book may not even be of our time,’ whereupon Tucholsky adds with an implied wink: ‘It is completely harmless. As harmless as Kleist.’